Principal Software Engineer

We’re hiring talented Cloud Services Engineers that are passionate about using software-based approaches to solve complex challenges and automate those solutions.  You’ll be part of the cloud engineering organization where we have a strong focus on using engineering and software practices to manage and scale our cloud infrastructure. As part of the organization who owns the relationships with our Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) you will be building products that improve the scalability of Snowflake. 

You’ll understand the CSP roadmap and products, and lead initiatives aimed at infrastructure, process, systems, and automation to achieve better efficiency and reliability. You will also discover bottlenecks, limitations, and new feature requests that influence the cloud ecosystem of products directly. 

Eventually, you will act as an architect between CSP and Snowflake services. You’ll build a deep understanding of Snowflake’s service and use that knowledge to optimize and evolve our infrastructure reliability, availability, serviceability, and profitability. As part of that you will contribute to building components of Virtual CSP (vCSP) layer, a cloud-agnostic approach to feature development within Snowflake. vCSP will help ease feature development to meet customers where they are–or want to be–faster than we do today.

You’ll work with some of the brightest engineers on the planet. To be successful, you’ll need to be technical and capable of holding your own with other strong peers.  You possess excellent communication, collaboration, and diplomacy skills. You have software development fundamentals, systems knowledge, and troubleshooting abilities. Ideally, you’re an expert on at least one major cloud provider and have experience practicing infrastructure-as-code. 

If you love solving problems at scale, prefer to write scalable, reliable, and testable software, are an ace troubleshooter, and are deeply technical, then this is the role for you!

AS A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER - CLOUD SERVICES  AT SNOWFLAKE YOU WILL:

• Introduce tools to facilitate greater automation and operability of services
• Architect, deploy, and scale observability infrastructure 
• Participate in on-call rotation and ensure uptime of services
• Create runtime tools/processes that optimize cloud triaging and limit downtime
• Define best practices around making our systems and services measurable
• Work closely with our various teams to ensure those best practices get applied 
• Utilize your deep experience and problem solving skills to help prevent and investigate production issues
• Plan and lead complicated technical projects that interact with a wide variety of teams within the company
• Take a data-first approach that helps define the investments of the world’s largest cloud service providers 

OUR IDEAL PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER - CLOUD  SERVICES WILL HAVE:

• 15 years of industry experience in software development 
• Multiple years experience with: Cloud computing (AWS, Azure, GCP, or others) Database systems (FoundationDB, Cassandra, MongoDB, etc.)
• Experience in programming in at least one of the following languages: Java, Python, Go, C++ 
• Experience with time-series based monitoring / observability systems
• Experience with Cloud computing toolsets - Terraform, Vault, Packer etc. 
• Experience with configuration management tools (Ansible, Pulumi, Chef, Puppet)
• Firm grasp of TCP/IP networking and troubleshooting
• Good knowledge of distributed systems, APIs, cloud computing patterns
• Tremendous attention to details and ability to build reliable and scalable software systems
• Effective communication and collaboration skills
• Solid interpersonal skills conducive to a team environment
• Able to debug, troubleshoot, and resolve complex technical issues
• Self-driven & motivated, with a strong work ethic and a passion for problem solving
• Experience and knowledge of Git, JIRA, and Jenkins a plus
• Bachelor’s or Master Degree in Computer Science or related field

MANDATORY REQUIREMENTS FOR THE ROLE:

The position may require access to U.S. export-controlled technologies or technical data.

Employment with Snowflake is contingent on Snowflake either verifying that you may legally access U.S. export-controlled technologies and technical data, or successfully obtaining by obtaining, in a timely manner, any necessary license or other authorization from the U.S. Government to allow you to have the ability to access U.S. export-controlled technology and technical data.

Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.